The Internet has experienced explosive growth in recent years. The emergence of the World Wide Web has enabled millions of users around the world to download easily web resources such as text, graphics, video, and sound data while at home, work, or from remote locations via wireless devices. This is achieved primarily through the use of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), a standardized way for computers to communicate with each other.
To request a web resource, a client web browser sends an HTTP request for the web resource to a server. The HTTP request often includes lengthy HTTP header information that must be processed by the server. In order to process the header information, the server must perform string matching, to identify whether known strings exist in the HTTP header. Further, according to the HTTP specification (HTTP/1.1, Internet RFC 2616, Fielding et al.), the disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference, HTTP headers are case insensitive. Thus, not only must string matching be performed for HTTP headers, but the string matching must be performed in a case-insensitive manner. This case-insensitive string matching requires additional processor calculations, and thereby contributes significantly to server delay, or latency, in responding to requests from the client.
It would be desirable to provide a system, method, and device capable of quickly and efficiently performing case-insensitive string matching on header information to increase processor efficiency and thereby reduce latency.